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Organizing Amazon by Tom Vickers offers a rare, empirically rich and theoretically well-founded account of labour struggle within the highly regulated, digitally mediated and fragmented work environment of Amazon's logistics operations. Centring on the case of the Coventry warehouse (BHX4), Vickers examines the unusual momentum of a unionisation campaign that, despite a precarious workforce, high turnover and extensive employer control, achieved substantial wage gains and had wider political effects. The book will be of particular interest to readers of New Technology, Work and Employment given its relevance to debates on migrant labour and on collective organisation under conditions of algorithmic management, digital surveillance and tight labour process control. Combining ethnographic fieldwork—including participant observation conducted between January and July 2024—and extensive in-depth semi-structured interviews with 11 Amazon workplace-leaders and activists as well as 4 GMB organisers, Vickers adopts an explicitly materialist and power-centred perspective (Appendix 2). In addition, through a series of essays by workplace activists and organisers he adds testimonies and experiences that lend the book an intriguing polyphony. His analysis situates the Coventry case within the broader critical sociology of work and the ‘organising turn’ in the British and international labour movements, in Chapter 2. Theoretically, Vickers draws on the work of Marx, as well as on Mezzadra's and Neilson's conceptualisation of labour as a contested movement of the human body through time and space, closely linked to migration regimes, alongside Hyman's and Thompson's analyses of industrial relations and workplace control. Together, these perspectives frame labour under capitalism as a site in which bodily movement is subordinated to capital's interests, while the pace, form and direction of work remain continuously contested due to workers' agency (pp. 4–7). The analytical centrepiece of the book is the ‘Coventry model’ a strategic framework distilled from the GMB union's approach and the experiences of workplace activists (Chapter 8). The model consists of six interrelated principles: (1) capitalising on spontaneous ruptures in everyday labour relations; (2) creating democratic spaces outside employer surveillance; (3) cultivating worker leadership; (4) adopting a ‘whole worker’ approach that addresses the broader social conditions shaping workers' lives; (5) challenging the employer's freedom to operate through external alliances; and (6) contesting Amazon's extensive apparatus of workplace control. Vickers interweaves this framework in Chapter 3 with accounts of material conflicts that shaped the campaign, particularly the broad worker dissatisfaction following Amazon's announcement of a mere £0.50 hourly raise in mid-2022. This decision came against the backdrop of soaring inflation, reaching 12.3% in August 2022, according to Vickers, and reported real-term pay cuts amounting to 22.6% since 2018, alongside record corporate profits (pp. 36–37). By contrast, Amazon had substantially increased its net income in the preceding years, rising from USD 11.6 billion in 2019 to USD 21.3 billion in 2020 and USD 33.4 billion in 2021, a fact well known among the workforce. These conditions sparked spontaneous sit-downs and work stoppages at the BHX4 warehouse. The GMB, which had maintained a presence, albeit limited, at the site since 2012, reacted quickly. Membership grew from approximately 60 to around 1400 within months. Vickers identifies this surge as the key precondition for the 37 strike actions undertaken between January 2023 and July 2024, ultimately producing wage increases of 28.5%—an exceptionally strong outcome even in a European Amazon logistics network with union activities in many sites. One of the book's most compelling contributions is its rigorous conceptualisation of ‘democratic spaces’ in contexts of digitalised labour control—developed most fully in Chapter 8 and strategically referenced in Chapter 3 to underscore its relevance for reaching the entire workforce. Vickers argues that strikes under algorithmic management should not be understood solely as expressions of already-existing majority support. Rather, they constitute opportunities to carve out physical and social spaces in which workers can meet, deliberate and develop collective strategies outside the reach of employer control. In the case under investigation, this includes not only picket lines, but also strike schools, mass strike meetings and leaders' days facilitating regular exchange (Chapter 8, p. 125). Through these practices, the profit-driven logic governing mobility at work will temporarily give way to a form of autonomous mobility (p. 134). In advancing this argument, he challenges dominant majority-oriented frameworks—especially the ‘supermajority’ model associated with Jane McAlevey—and offers a compelling, empirically grounded defence of minority strikes under conditions of pronounced power asymmetry. Another strength lies in the depth of Vickers' engagement with migration, precarity and workforce diversity. In Chapter 6 he demonstrates how workers' heterogeneous life situations—transnational family responsibilities, linguistic fragmentation, insecure immigration status—shape both the constraints and the possibilities of collective organising. The GMB's ‘whole worker’ approach, which includes providing immigration advice services and ESOL classes (English for speakers of other languages) illustrates the need for unions to address workers' social reproduction beyond immediate workplace issues. For international debates on organising migrant and precarious workers, the book's empirical detail is particularly valuable. Despite the campaign's achievements in wage gains and political visibility, in Chapter 4, Vickers highlights several structural constraints that limit the institutionalisation of union power. First, he discusses the financial pressures associated with strike support, which significantly restricted the campaign's ability to scale up. As in many other European contexts, the UK lacks a broad civil-society infrastructure capable of sustaining large-scale industrial conflict. This underscores the extent to which resource dependency shapes the scope of workplace mobilisation. Second, in Chapters 2 and 9, Vickers provides a self-critical assessment of the GMB's internal dynamics. Lessons from Coventry—particularly regarding how to support migrant workers—have yet to be fully integrated into the wider organisation. While he engages with key historical moments and uneven processes of reckoning around internal racism and sexism, he also demonstrates that local innovation in reorienting trade union practices towards migrant workers remained largely confined to the immediate locality (pp. 15–19). This internal organisational challenge positions the book not only as a case study but also as a contribution to broader debates on union renewal and organisational learning. Another central element of the book is the analysis of the statutory recognition ballot on union recognition and entering formal negotiations, which was narrowly lost in July 2024—see Chapter 4, Essay 5. Vickers shows how the legal architecture of the UK recognition system—postal voting, stringent quorum requirements—and unions' limited access to the workplace—structurally advantages employers in their use of anti-union strategies. Amazon used these conditions to pursue an intense campaign of union avoidance that involved targeted one-to-one meetings, multilingual messaging and the deployment of external managers. Vickers also reflects on the potential for a formal recognition to become a mixed blessing, noting that institutionalised roles may risk distancing workplace leaders from their co-workers. On the theoretical level, two limitations deserve attention. First, while Vickers engages extensively with migration- and control-theoretical literature, he pays less attention to power resources analysis within industrial relations scholarship (Chapter 1). A more systematic engagement with these debates could have sharpened the book's account of the structural limits of union power in the recognition process. Second, although the book examines fragmentation largely through the lenses of migration, language and immigration status, it pays comparatively limited attention to other axes of segmentation—gender, age and especially health—even though these dimensions are empirically salient in Amazon logistics. Methodologically, the book rests on a solid empirical foundation, and its close engagement with union activists provides valuable, fine-grained insights. At the same time, the author's own position as a union secondee, and his use of a sample composed largely of highly active union members and organisers, introduces potential sources of bias. Although he reflects on these limitations, employing the lens of debates on activist ethnography and friendship as method (see Appendix 2, p. 140), the analysis would have benefited from complementary survey data to approximate the attitudes of those who are not represented in the study. This would have helped to counterbalance the partiality inherent in the qualitative sample and strengthen the overall methodological robustness. Overall, Organizing Amazon offers an analytically rich and empirically detailed contribution to debates on labour, technology and organisation. For scholars, the book provides valuable insights into the emergence of collective agency under algorithmic management and digital surveillance. For practitioners, it delivers concrete lessons on challenging managerial control, recruiting marginalised workers and developing democratic internal union cultures. By repositioning the British Amazon case—from a frequently cited example of union weakness to a site of real, conflictual and strategically sophisticated organising—Vickers contributes meaningfully to the international literature on Amazon labour struggles. At the same time, the book raises a broader question: Can unions organise the ‘precarious collective worker’ beyond individual worksites? As Vickers shows, the challenges at a single site are already so substantial that little capacity remains to construct sectoral or regional power. This dilemma remains unresolved and is of central importance for both academic labour research and contemporary union strategy. This research was funded by the Hans Böckler Foundation under Grant Number 2024-92-2. The open access publication was funded by the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. The author declares no conflicts of interest.